The Total Workplace: Facilities Management and Elastic Organisation

Type	Book, Whole
Author(s)	Becker,F.
Publication year	1990
Notes	ID: BECKER1990; Ten years on this remains a classic and it is perhaps a sad commentary on the development of FM that it is so. Much of what Becker argues for remains valid, yet hard to attain today. An FM organisation should be strategic and elastic, facilitative rather than precriptive. Workplaces can be designed to enhance various forms of informal communication. Knowledge work (and Becker draws on the early work of Takeuchi and Nonaka) concerns outcomes and results, not presence at a desk. The barriers are culture and $"shared patterns of thought, belief, feelings and values that result from shared experience and common learning"$. Unless these are shifted (c.f. Price and Shaw, 1998) little will change and the skeptic can point to the lack of evidence that FM can do much about it. Unfortunately, despite the vison of pioneers like Becker, much of the subsequent pattern of FM and related property professions has not risen to the challenge, or found ways to convince the prevailing skeptic. Every thinking practitioner should be able to claim they have read the book. Few probably do so.
Start page	1
End page	324
Relevance to practice	High
Ease of application	Hard, because of prevailing patterns
Evidence base	Good
Readability	High

Comments

No comments yet for this article.